


The color of the wheat fields

by Kangoo



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Karen-centric, The Little Prince - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 08:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20963888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangoo/pseuds/Kangoo
Summary: "It is your own fault," said the little prince. "I never wished you any sort of harm; but you wanted me to tame you . . .""Yes, that is so," said the fox."But now you are going to cry!" said the little prince."Yes, that is so," said the fox."Then it has done you no good at all!""It has done me good," said the fox, "because of the color of the wheat fields.”Karen doesn't tame a fox, but she does get a predator of her own.





	The color of the wheat fields

Out of all the books her mother used to read her, The Little Prince had always been Karen's favorite. Adventure called to her in the way it called to every child; she drew maps of the world, clumsy and colored, on which was carefully traced the itinerary from Vermont to The Desert — because surely there could only be one of them in the world.

She used to dream about the desert, about foxes and snakes and roses on faraway stars. She sat in her cardboard boxes-plane, with a wool hat and swimming goggles, pretending to be both a space princess and the daring pilot lost in the wild. She learned to draw the best sheep anyone had ever seen, and then roses and snakes and foxes too, so the sheep wouldn't be all alone.

She had grown up, eventually, and the cardboard plane and childish drawings were forgotten in the attic with all the rest of her (and, eventually, Kevin's) childhood. Teenagers don't have time for toys or play-pretend, college students even less so.

But the book had kept its place in her bookshelf, pages creased from being dogeared so many times, cover falling out and being stitched back on again. It was always the first book she put up after each move, and often the first one she read during her first night in a new place, the best cure to the bittersweet taste of homesickness. She carried it with her everywhere — in her suitcase during family holidays, to the hospital waiting room that one time Mary, her college roommate, broke her ankle and had to be driven to the ER, in her bag when she went to work. It was always there, in case she needed it.

Adulthood had yet to prove to be more than a succession of increasingly painful headaches, but it had yet to steal the fun from this book. If anything else it had enhanced it; Saint-Exupéry's personal brand of philosophy had meant much to her, in many different ways, for as long as she had known enough about the alphabet to decipher the story all by herself.

Wesley, on the other hand… Wesley had changed that.

It felt wrong to handle the book, which was nothing if not a tale of kindness in the face of life's everyday cruelty, with hands still heavy with the weight of a gun. She felt as if there was still dried blood stuck under her nails, despite the fact that his blood never even brushed the touch of her fingers, and she feared the marks she would leave on the pages. The bloody fingerprints of a murderer. Innocence had died with a full clip discharged in a monster's chest — innocence had died with blood not her own on her clothes and the empty-eyed stare of a dead body. This book, this story, was all there was left of it. She refused to be the one to taint it with the smell of gunpowder, the darkness of death which clung to her like a too-large coat.

She did not regret it. She only wished there had been another way out — a way to keep her hands clean and herself safe. A way that would not have disappointed small Karen quite so much.

So The Little Prince had been dropped at the bottom of a box, covered by the clothes she had worn that day, and hidden under her bed. Out of sight, out of mind — out of _reach_.

But then Frank Castle happened. Bloody, bruised, battered Frank, with his voice like a thunderstorm heard from far away, rumbling in his chest and unable to quite escape it.

She had grown _fond _of him, a man so dangerous yet so close to his breaking point, a glass sculpture balanced at the edge of a tall shelf. She had traded curiosity for understanding, had lost fear along the way and replaced it by an odd sort of care for him.

Had found it again, hidden like a forgotten bill between the pages of an old book, folded in a tight corner behind her ribs, when he had looked up at her — a wounded man at his feet, more fitting in that tableau than ever before — and told her he was already dead. Fear felt like an old, unwelcome friend, or an ember stuck in her throat, fire eating at her flesh and slowly smothering her with the smoke.

Fear had not come alone.

At first, yes, she had been scared. For the colonel, who was an asshole but who deserved justice all the same. For her. For him. For the path he was threading on, combat boots leaving bloody footprints in his tracks.

And then she had been _angry_, because how dare he makes her care? Her heart was wounded enough as it was, a mass of scar tissue and bruised and fresh paper cuts that still, stubbornly, refused to break. She didn't need his trauma, his blood lust, didn't need him to come by and throw a few glass shards in the mix.

But, in the end, all she had been left with was sadness. A sort of grief, perhaps, for the man he used to be, the man he could have been. A man she wanted to keep, to hold on to with two hands and never let go, until she realized she never had him to begin with.

Sadness, for Karen Page, had one simple cure, held between the pages of a downright antique hardcover edition of The Little Prince.

For the first time in months, in the first grey light of an insomnia-induced early morning, Karen rummaged through the cardboard box under her bed and dug out an old battered book. It had the worn corners and half-faded illustrations of a well-loved story carried from childhood to adulthood whole by sheer affection for it — and a few haphazard patch jobs. Her name was still written on the first blank page in red crayon; her favorite passages still underlined in pencil, careful straight lines under words she could still quote by heart.

_A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral._

She wondered, for a moment, if a murderer remained such after a foolish wannabe reporter had observed him and seen a good man in his place.

The Little Prince had always been her favorite way to deal with emotional turmoil. Nothing seemed to matter quite as much after reading the quest of a young boy through space and back again, and once she turned the last page, she found herself a little more settled, a little less likely to have a full blown panic attack.

It didn't mean she forgave Frank. That wasn't something she envisaged herself doing anytime soon, if ever. But she could accept his decision — it had, after all, basically nothing to do with her. What was she to him but a bait, an obstacle on his warpath? Not much, that was what. And she found that she was okay with that.

Karen, thrill-seeker extraordinaire, had been lost to student debts and soul-sucking jobs a long time ago. Her recent come back from the grave to haunt Karen, responsible if mildly traumatized adult, had only served to remind her that this was not the life for her.

She would gladly leave vigilante-chasing to bolder, braver people. She was quite fine as she was, not being shot and never seeing the blank hospital walls from the point of view of a patient.

Unfortunately it seemed that, even when Karen did not look for danger, danger still, against all odds, looked for Karen.

Fear came in many flavors, so to speak. It came as a burn, an all-consuming wildfire trapped behind wide, wild eyes; the survival instinct inherent to everyone who was not a vigilante. It came as the hot-blooded rush of adrenaline when your mind, thrown into its most basic fight-or-flight response, decided offense was the best defense, bloody knuckles and copper sharp on your tongue.

Karen found herself prey to one last kind of fear, one she had experience once before, in a warehouse empty of everything but a table, a monster, and a gun. A freezing kind of fear, frost climbing her spine and turning it to steel, the kind of fear that slowed down time into one moment of pure clarity.

In that second in the eye of the cyclone, two thoughts came to her.

The first was that no amount of whits and stalling would save her from this particular situation. An old man died from a bullet through his forehead for screaming too loud and Karen looks down, wondering if this fate was maybe not kinder than what is in store for the rest of them.

The second was, _I wish Frank was there_. It was genuine enough that she was briefly surprised, but not for long. It was, after all, completely true: of all the people she knew, Frank seemed like the best suited to rescuing people from blood-thirsty gangsters, and against her best judgment she had started to feel— safe, knowing he was out there, bringing hell right to the doorsteps of criminals.

Strange, how safety and danger could become twisted-entangled-unified, sometimes.

But Frank was not there. _They_ _were_. Turk and her and all the nameless, innocent victims quivering behind her, voice breaking in useless supplications. People she had started to feel responsible for as soon as she had realized she was the most level-headed of them all — her, Karen Page, a human mess and a murderer.

Her, Karen Page, powerless to save any of them.

There was nothing to do to hide the blinking red light attached to Turk's ankle. Nothing that could be said that would placate their captors long enough for help to come.

Nothing that could be done to save him.

A blade was drawn from its sheath — it glinted in the low light, cold as iron, cold as steel. The man knelt in front of them, pinning Turk's ankle to the ground one handed and letting the knife rest on his skin, just a second before he started cutting.

Blood welled up under the sharp edge. Turk cried out, trying and failing to drag himself back.

Then, a gunshot — Karen wondered, for a second, if another of the screaming people at her back had been silenced by a bullet through the skull, before the knife fell from limp fingers and the gangster slumped forward with a single hole through his forehead.

Karen scrambled away from her kidnappers and looked back with them, shock and hope and terror fighting for the control of her mind, and as she lifted her eyes she saw—

Black boots, leaving bloody footprints—

Bullet casings, falling to the ground, all too loud despite the chaos around—

Dark clothing, as if the shadows themselves had decided to fight against the corruption—

A riffle, held between bruised fingers, bloody finger resting on the trigger—

A skull, white against a backdrop of darkness, the sight made all the more jarring by the blood splattered over it—

Frank.

A wave of relief washed over her, drowning all the fear and the anger and the regrets, only leaving behind it the knowledge that things were going to be alright, but first they were going to get a _lot worse_.

And then she yelled, “Get down!” and lunged to the ground herself, dragging Turk with her, seconds before bullets started flying from both side. Some ricocheted on the walls or the ground and briefly illuminated the Punisher in a shower of sparks, throwing hard shadows on his face. Each of _his_ shots struck true; _one shot, one kill_.

Karen crawled on the floor, scrambling for cover from the firefight. She hid behind a pillar, curled on herself, closed her eyes, and counted in her head.

_Shot, shot, reload. Shot, shot, reload. _She could almost follow his path through the room by the echo of bullet casings falling, the screaming, the pounding of feet as gangsters tried to get away from the massacre. None went very far.

Silence fell and she kept counting. The sudden absence of sound, where they had just been so many of them, was not enough to make her open her eyes.

_Step, step, step, stop. _She could imagine him checking each of his victim for signs of life. A shot; agonized groaning stopped short. A mercy killing, if such thing could be said of anything a man like Frank Castle ever did.

_Step, step, step, stop_. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her bent neck. Could hear the shifting of clothes as he knelt in front of her, stretched his hand toward her and stopped short of her hair. The silence was deafening, barely broken by the occasional whimpering of the other victims.

His hand ever so slowly came to rest on the top of her head. Softly, Frank said, “Hey.”

She lifted her head, slightly, enough that she could look at him in all his blood-splattered glory. His eyes were large and dark, full of something much like fear — she had never known him to be afraid before. Except maybe once, lying on the floor of her apartment in the shaking seconds after shots were fired through her windows, his weight pinning her down — holding her down — and eyes scanning his surroundings, jumping from side to side like that of a wolf backed in a corner.

“Hey,” She replied, barely above a sigh. His expression softened, lost some of its manic edge. She wanted to tell him— something, but she couldn't, for the life of her, find _what_ to say. She didn't want to tell him he was dead to her. Didn't want to tell her she forgave him.

He could apparently read this on her face, or in her eyes, or in the way she shifted, halfway through breaking away from his touch or leaning into it, she couldn't say. He gently pressed on her head until she was resting against his shoulder, one of his hand petting her hair reassuringly and the other rubbing her back. His leather jacket smelled like gun smoke and blood, but everything of his did, in the end, so she had a hard time bringing herself to care about it.

“You're okay, now, hear me?” He whispered into her ear, as soft as his voice ever got. “You're safe. You all are.”

She sighed, a quivering, wet thing, and wondered who he was trying to reassure: him or her. Maybe both.

She watched him kill people before, and still each time all she saw was a good man pushed to his breaking point. She started to wonder if, maybe, she had made him that way, with half-coherent pleas for mercy when there was place for none.

She started to wonder him maybe it simply took a killer to tame a killer. Maybe all it took was gunpowder fingers clutching his arms hard enough to leave bruises, tears shed on his jacket that's as most leather as it is blood and rust. A little show of foolish, fearless trust.

_You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed._

Karen took one last deep breath of his awful-familiar scent, wiped her tears on her sleeves, and got to her feet.

“You have a job to do,” She said, sounding more sure than she felt. “And so do I.”

He looked at her, searching for something — answers, maybe — in her eyes. What he found there seemed to satisfy him because he nodded, once, said, “Ma'am,” and left as he came — in stride, combat boots leaving a trail of blood in his wake, rifle resting against his chest.

She couldn’t quite begrudge Frank for the deaths. It was, after all, as much her fault as his, for wishing him there.

She couldn't find it in herself to feel guilty about it, either.

Karen squared up her shoulders, looked around the room and said, “The way down is clear. Let's get out of there.”


End file.
